Aesthetics of sexual difference. Kant, the “fair sex” and the aesthetic reflection

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Published: Jun 30, 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7764/69.18
Keywords:
Immanuel Kant, diferencia sexual, bello, sublime Immanuel Kant, sexual difference, beautiful, sublime

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Luis Ignacio García
UNC-CONICET

Abstract

This paper analyzes the genderization of the difference between the beautiful and the sublime as it is stated in Kant's Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime. This difference is posed under the assumption of sexual difference, and not only a difference is stipulated but a hierarchization that places man in the sublime-rational pole above woman, located in the beautiful-sensitive pole, thus replicating an old metaphysical-androcentric tradition. From this initial proposal, the evolution of the same distinction is analyzed, but in the context of the theory of aesthetic judgment raised in the Critique of judgement. The 1790 work, which continues to replicate the beautiful / sublime difference already operating in the 1764 essay, however, at the same time offers a theory of taste that places aesthetic judgment beyond the masculinist hierarchies of reason and understanding. The text proposes that explicit misogyny coexists in Kant's aesthetics with a theory of taste implicitly profitable for the deconstruction of the metaphysical dichotomies on which that misogyny is based.

Article Details

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No. 69 (2021): Aisthesis 69
Section
Articles
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Author Biography

Luis Ignacio García, UNC-CONICET

Luis Ignacio García, PhD from the National University of Córdoba (UNC). He is a regular professor at UNC, holder of the chair “Modern Aesthetics and Literary Criticism” and adjunct in “Philosophical Conceptions”. He has been a doctoral and postdoctoral fellow at CONICET and is currently part of the Scientific Researcher Career of the same Council, serving as Adjunct Researcher. He has directed various programs and research projects at Secyt-UNC, currently one entitled “Aesthetics and politics in contemporary thought”, within the framework of the program “The actuality of criticism: new materialisms, imagination and ways of life”. He directed the “Golpe ciego” collection of Borde perdido publishing house and was part of the editorial committee of the philosophy journal Nombres. He currently directs the Costureras collection of La Sofía cartonera, and is part of the editorial committee of the journal Heterotopías. He has focused his interests on the intersection between aesthetics and politics in contemporary thought and in recent cultural debates, topics on which he has published in national and international media and on which he has given seminars in the country and abroad. Foreign. Among his main works are the books La Babel del odio. Políticas de la lengua en el frente antifascista (Biblioteca Nacional, 2021 –in press), La comunidad en montaje. Imaginación política y postdictadura (Prometeo, 2018), Modernidad, cultura y crítica (UNC, 2014), Políticas de la memoria y de la imagen (Universidad de Chile, 2011), La crítica entre culturas. Estética, política, recepción (Universidad de Chile, 2011). In addition, he has edited Estéticas de la inequivalencia. Teoría crítica, situacionismos, materialismos (Borde perdido, 2021 –en prensa), La imaginación política (La Cebra, 2017), Instantáneas de la memoria. Fotografía y dictadura en Argentina y América Latina (Libraria, 2013), y Golpe ciego. Oscar del Barco, insistencias (Borde perdido, 2017).